BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Flying Instead of Feeling, but the Fantasy of Motion Is Also Risky

Jerry Battle, the ruminative narrator of Chang-rae Lee's affecting new novel, is a spiritual relative of both John Updike's Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom and Walker Percy's Binx Bolling in ''The Moviegoer.'' He's a perfectly ordinary middle-class guy, an avatar in many ways of his generation's aspirations and failings. He's also an alienated escape artist who seeks relief from the everydayness of life in his favorite pastime, in his case not moviegoing but piloting a small plane.

Jerry is also kin of course to the hero of Mr. Lee's last book, ''A Gesture Life'' (1999). He is another of this author's careful, cautious heroes who would prefer not to feel too much, who work hard at avoiding emotional engagement and risk.

Although the plot of ''Aloft'' -- like that of Mr. Lee's first novel, ''Native Speaker'' (1995) -- often strains credulity, he writes with such uncommon grace, such complete understanding of his hero's inner life that the reader is happy to overlook the story's occasional lurches.

Mr. Lee creates a pointillist portrait of three generations of a family as it has motored its way from blue collar immigrant hopes to bourgeois respectability to new money indulgence, and in doing so he gently nudges Jerry and his relatives into holding up a mirror to the American Dream in all its glittering and treacherous promise.

In mapping Jerry's world, a small patch of Long Island somewhere between Cheever country and Gatsby's vanished green Eden, Mr. Lee gives us telling snapshots of the middle class and how one man comes to terms with ''the plain stupid luck of your draw in a macrocosm rigged with absolutely nothing particular about you in mind.''

Metaphors play a large role in this novel, and as the title indicates, Jerry's love of flying becomes a symbol of his detachment from reality, his belief in the consolations of ''motion and transit,'' and his craving to escape the bounds of gravity and all the hobbling entanglements of love and commitment.

The recurring fantasy of his life is ''one of perfect continuous travel, this unending hop from one point to another, the pleasures found not in the singular marvels of any destination but in the constancy of serial arrivals and departures, and the comforting companion knowledge that you'll never quite get intimate enough for any trouble to start brewing.''

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

The source of Jerry's disengagement, what his daughter calls his ''preternatural lazy-heartedness,'' has to do with the terrible death of his wife, Daisy, many years ago. Suffering from manic-depression, Daisy, a Korean immigrant who had reinvented herself as an all-American suburban housewife, began to exhibit increasingly erratic behavior, going on mad shopping sprees, then sinking into terrible funks where she could barely ''drag a brush through her tangled, unwashed hair.'' One summer afternoon, high on Valium and beer, she drowned in their backyard swimming pool, leaving Jerry to raise their two young children alone.

Although Jerry later has a long relationship with a live-in girlfriend named Rita who becomes a stepmother to his children, he never marries her or agrees to have a baby with her, and after two decades, fed up with his passivity and emotional unavailability, Rita finally leaves him.

Jerry's relationship with his son, Jack, who is trying to turn the family landscaping business into a huge home improvement company, is similarly distant, as is his relationship with his feisty, academic daughter, Theresa. His rap sheet, Jerry notes, is that ''I'm one to leap up from the mat to aid all manner of strangers and tourists and other wide-eyed foreigners, but when it comes to loved ones and family I can hardly ungear myself from the La-Z-Boy and want only succor and happy sufferance in return.''

Jerry's stewardship of the family business has been similarly lacking in passion. He has been hardworking and dutiful but always somewhat disengaged. Unlike his father -- a shrewd, vulgar patriarch who bears a passing resemblance to Junior Soprano -- he has not been ''much of a producer or founder,'' rather ''just caretaking what I've been left and/or given, and consuming my fair share of the bright and new, and shirking almost all civic duties save paying the property taxes and sorting the recycling, basically steering clear of trouble.''

There are problems looming in Jerry's family, however, that will test his doctrine of avoidance and escape, problems that will make him aware of the consequences of failing to communicate.

Mr. Lee's orchestration of these multiplying crises -- which include cancer, bankruptcy and a mysterious disappearance -- may feel melodramatic and implausible at times. But his portrait of Jerry and his family grows in resonance and chiaroscuro as the book progresses, leaving us contemplating not this book's scattershot plot, but its wise, keenly observed and even more keenly felt picture of the ''endlessly curious circumstance and befuddlement'' that attends its hero's life.